‘Checkmate!’: Von Kempelen’s Chess Turk and the Significance of Losing to a Machine By Elise Bikker 2nd Year PHD-student at the University of York, English and Related Literature
When ‘The Turk’ was exhibited in London in 1820, English mathematician and philosopher Charles Babbage (1791-1871) challenged it to a game and was defeated. (Standage, 2002, p. 140) The Turk was the famous chess playing clockwork automation by the Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen (17341804). The oriental features and garments gave the life-sized wooden figure an exotic appearance. Babbage believed the machine to be a fake but afterwards conceived of an algorithm that theoretically enabled a mechanical automaton to play chess or other games of skill. Babbage regarded artificial intelligence as a strong computing power,
i.e. memory and foresight enabling the machine to assess each possible move and select the most advantageous one to play an unbeatable game (Babbage, 1864, p. 465-467; Standage, 2002, p. 140-145). Babbage’s conviction that the machine was a fraud was right: the exhibitor had to rely on the talent of the hidden human chess player inside the Turk to bring his not-soartificial intelligence to life. However, despite much speculation, from its first performance in 1770 until a few years after its demise in a fire in 1854, the Turk raised the question of whether a machine could be made to ‘think’. The automaton explored the
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